Workflow for Marketing brochures and books

Hi

Is anyone out there using shotgun to track and manage Marketing workflows for Printing books, brochures and other similar workflows.

Our graphics department are the last team to get on board to shotgun and i would like to get in contact with someone who has looked at this type of workflow with shotgun before.

Thanks

Panos

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Hi Panos,

Welcome to the community, thanks for your post! I don’t have firsthand experience with tracking this sort of thing, but I imagine with a few tweaks to some of the core templates that Shotgun comes with we’ll be able to accommodate your workflow.

Could you describe the steps you go through to produce a book or brochure? The key will be mapping those steps into Tasks/Pipeline steps to reflect how those things move through their production lifecycle.

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We don’t use Shotgun for book production specifically, but we do use it to produce exhibition experiences, so I’ve definitely wrestled with figuring out different workflows and would be happy to discuss. @brandon.foster’s question is definitely the jumping off point - first thing is defining the process.

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Thank you @brandon.foster and @jlweiss indeed process should come first and I will get straight to it. I suppose what i wanted to achieve by posting here is to 1) check that its an actual thing to go down the SG route and 2) potentially get an insight into other company’s workflows as im starting from scratch with this team and i also want to make sure that we aren’t doing anything stupid along the way.
@jlweiss I would like to know more about what you actually do as exhition experiences is also one of our services. If you want we can chat further offline. panos@lightfield.london

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Shotgun is pretty flexible. I once used it to mock up the tracking of finds for an archaeological dig (my wife is an archaeologist):

Using it for its intended purpose (media production), you should find it much easier to map your workflows ;-). You may find that you can repurpose one of the stock entities like Asset to track the work, but if not, you can turn on custom entities to track the brochures/books. This article describes that process:

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That’s brilliant, great to see what other people are using it for.
I’ve done a bit of Custom Entities to tailor our Real Time teams levels and sub levels. Also I did a few tweaks on how our film department work, in that we don’t really use Sequences as a series of shots, we make the sequence our entire “film”, and converted (renamed) episode to a “booking or PO number”. It works for us.

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Hello @brandon.foster,

It’s great to see the versatility of Shotgun. What’s the best way to integrate such a setup with the Shotgun Toolkit? Especially in the context of digital design I find it challenging to combine a custom process set up in the Shotgun web interface with engines and apps like the one for Photoshop or After Effects. Do you have any material that provides more context on this?

Thank you,
Christian

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We have guides on how to do just that (getting the integrations working with non “stock” entities):

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Ah cool, that’s very helpful. Especially step #7 and #8 contain information I wasn’t aware of. There’s always something new to discover in the world of the Shotgun Toolkit. :smile:

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